


save me

by ThanksForListening



Category: NCIS
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, F/M, I couldn't help myself lol, Nightmares, PTSD, light fluff, like none of those are explicitly mentioned but they underline the whole piece
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-11-08 18:55:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20840363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThanksForListening/pseuds/ThanksForListening
Summary: "They were loudest at night.That’s not to say they didn’t haunt her during the day. The voices that followed Ziva were not afraid of sunlight, were not confined to her subconscious. But in the deepest hours of the night, when the sun and moon were both in transition, when the world fell silent, if just for a few moments, before waking back up again — that was when they thrived, when they echoed as loud as they could. When they became impossible to ignore."Ziva has a nightmare, which leads to a conversation that could only happen at four in the morning.





	save me

**Author's Note:**

> i wanted to get this up before the next episode so if some stuff doesn't flow or sound quite right that's why lol. also i couldn't watch them give ziva an anxiety storyline and not immediately jump on that lol

They were loudest at night. 

That’s not to say they didn’t haunt her during the day. The voices that followed Ziva were not afraid of sunlight, were not confined to her subconscious. But in the deepest hours of the night, when the sun and moon were both in transition, when the world fell silent, if just for a few moments, before waking back up again — that was when they thrived, when they echoed as loud as they could. When they became impossible to ignore. 

She opened her eyes to find herself enclosed in darkness, and she knew what awaited her. Resistance, she’d learned, was useless. The voices were stronger, louder, more powerful than she was. Every night she fought them, and every night they won.

_Worthless,_ they told her. She could see in the darkness a face, could see the person speaking, but the image wasn’t clear, was never clear, and the voice itself was both familiar and unrecognizable. The words were layered, the voices echoing as if multiple people were speaking but they weren’t quite in unison. _Look at you. Alone. Abandoned. How many times did you think they would come for you before they realized you aren’t worth the effort?_

“Stop,” she begged. “Please. It isn’t true.”

_Look what you’ve done to them. To everybody who loves you. You’ve hurt them. All you ever do is hurt them. You don’t deserve their love. You just destroy yourself and leave them to pick up the pieces. You had to know they’d grow tired of you at some point._

“No,” she croaked, and she tried to fight it but failed. The voices were all she could hear. They were everything, and she was nothing. 

_You think they wanted you to come back? They were happy without you. And if they weren’t, it was only because you put them here. You did this to them._

“Who are you?” She called out into the nothingness around her, but her question echoed away, the sound swallowed up by the darkness around her. 

_You know me,_ the voices condensed into one, one she’d recognize anywhere. Tony stepped forward, but he wore an expression she’d never seen on his face before, one of pure malice, of pure hatred. _You used to love me_. 

“I still love you.”

_Oh, do you?_ He mocked, and the words hit her heart like daggers. The voices had never taken a clear face before, some part of her whispered, and she didn’t know how to fight this. _Because I recall you sending me away, ignoring me until you could ship our daughter to me, the one you never told me about, before going on your little vacation_. 

“It wasn’t—“

_Is that what love is? Secrets and lies and abandonment? Is that all you know how to do, how to be?_

“You don’t understand—“

_The apple really doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?_ He asked, and she reached for her chest, tried to see if her body was still in tact, because she was pretty sure his words had blown a hole right through her, had shattered her heart and filled her lungs with glass. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything as he glared at her. His face didn’t change, but somehow she saw other faces behind it: her father, Ari. Gibbs. Tony’s face shifted into his, but he stared at her with bloodshot eyes and confusion. _I don’t know you,_ Gibbs said, and she realized where she knew this look, this version of him — he looked at her the way he had all those years ago, when he’d woken up from a coma, no memory of the decades he’d been living since he lost Shannon and Kelly.

“Gibbs,” she whispered. She knew this script. Knew what she had said, knew what she had to say now, to get him back. “Ari...Ari killed Kate.” She watched as recognition washed over him as she finished. “And I…”

_You killed your brother_, he said, and she waited for him to finish the sentence the way he was supposed to, to look at her with understanding, with sympathy, but all she saw in his eyes was horror. _You killed your brother_. 

“To save you,” she cried, “I did it for you.”

_Who else have you hurt in the name of those you claim to love?_ She stared at him, mouth open, tears streaming down her face. He shook his head, his expression dripping with disappointment. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, but his face never changed, and she closed her eyes, tried to burn it out of her memory. 

The past was waiting, and she tried to disappear into herself. Her life flew by in snippets, glimpses of happier moments doing their best to outweigh what waited for her out there, in the dark. She saw her brother as a child, innocence in his eyes and no blood on his hands. Her sister, a few days before her last day, smiling and singing a tune to herself. Her mother, trying to scold them for going out in the rain but laughing at the way they looked all covered in mud. She saw herself as a child, alone in a studio, spinning across the floor, eyes focused on a spot on the wall in front of her. She watched that little girl spin again, again, again, and part of her wished she could keep her eyes closed forever, could stay in that moment where her biggest concerns were her posture and her form and whether she could get across the room without getting dizzy.

_Ima?_ Her eyes shot open. Back in the dark, the voice shifted, the face shifted, and she watched as her daughter stood in front of her, the toddler she’d left behind. She blinked and Tali was older, looked the way she did now. _Ima?_ She asked again, and suddenly she was an adult, a grown woman with Tony’s eyes and Tony’s hair, and Ziva desperately searched for herself in her daughter but found nothing. She looked for the Star of David, the one she’d placed in her arms before leaving her in that house, but her neck was bare. Ziva stared into the eyes of a stranger. _Do you even know me, Ima?_

“Tali,” she begged, for what she didn’t know, and she reached forward but her daughter evaporated, and only the darkness that surrounded her remained. “No,” she whispered, and she tried to run but there was nowhere to go, nobody waiting for her. She was utterly and completely alone. 

Ziva woke up with a gasp. Her hand instinctively reached for her chest, her heart racing inside of her. She blinked furiously, tried to get rid of any lingering darkness. She glanced to her left, where Tony lay undisturbed, his chest moving up and down slowly and evenly. She sighed, grateful that she’d learned to stop screaming years ago. 

Standing up, she slowly made her way to the bathroom, where she turned on all the lights and forced her eyes to stay open despite the pain of the fluorescents. She looked up, stared at her reflection in the mirror. The woman who stared back at her had dark circles under her eyes and fear inside them. The woman breathed rapidly, taking in breath after breath but never truly exhaling. She looked like a hurt dog, like something you pitied but didn’t want near you, didn’t want to actually take the time to fix. A lost cause. Not worth the effort. Ziva closed her eyes. She didn’t recognize that woman.

“Good to know that bathrooms are still our thing.” She heard a voice from behind her, and if she had any energy she might have lunged out of instinct, but all she could do was turn her head to where Tony stood in the doorway, his hair disheveled and sleep in his eyes. 

“I’m sorry I woke you,” she said softly, the words more of a breath than a statement. 

“You didn’t wake me,” he responded. “It was weird, actually. One minute I was dreaming, and the next, I had this feeling that I had to go, and I had to go now.” He shrugged. “I woke up and you were gone.”

“Oh.”

“You wanna talk about it?” He asked, and his tone didn’t change but she could feel the hesitation, the apprehension in his words. They didn’t quite know how to do this yet, how to be with one another like this, how to figure out what trust still existed and what had to be earned again.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“You sure about that?”

“I—“ she started, and part of her wanted to, wanted to talk to him and let him hold her and tell her everything was going to be okay, but she didn’t know if she had the right to expect that from him anymore. Wasn’t sure if she ever had that right. “I don’t know if I can explain it.”

“If you want to try, I’m here to listen.”

“You’re—“ she started, her voice somewhere between incredulous and accusatory. She closed her mouth, tried to take deep breaths, tried to not let out the thoughts that had been simmering for years, the ones she’d done her best to forget these past few days.

“What is it?” He asked, and she shook her head. She silently begged him to drop it, prayed that he’d just go back to bed. She didn’t know what would happen if she let go of her tongue, what he would think of her when she spoke whatever words she’d spent the past few years silencing. 

“Nothing, Tony. It’s nothing.”

“Come on, Zi, I—“

“Why did you come for me?” She asked, and when she was met with a confused expression, she added, “All those years ago. In Somalia. I’d abandoned you, I was supposed to be dead, and yet you came. Why?”

“You know why.”

“I thought I did,” she said, turning away from him. She tried to ignore the memories that came with that place, tried to forget how seeing his face had made her feel. She took a breath and looked back at him. “I thought I knew a lot of things, until my house went up in flames, and nobody came. You didn’t come.” 

He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. 

“Did I expect too much?” She continued, and she could feel herself losing control or the words coming out of her mouth, the words she had never planned to speak out loud. She supposed that was the power of the dead of night — it pulled things from you that you thought were buried deep beneath the surface. “I became used to it — time after time, from the moment I joined this team, somebody always came to rescue me. You, Gibbs, Jenny, McGee. And I never expected it, even when I asked. For over a decade you constantly surprised me. You saved me. Again and again, you saved me. And as I watched my house burn to the ground, I thought maybe you’d save me once more.”

“Ziva, I—“

“But I guess I thought wrong. I asked for too much. I know my worth now. I won’t make that mistake again.”

“Stop,” He said, and she finally looked at him, really looked at him. She didn’t know what to do with the tears she saw in his eyes, the ones she caused, a voice whispered in the back of her mind. “Do you want to know why I didn’t look for you?”

Ziva swallowed. “I’m not sure that I do.”

“I didn’t think I could handle it. Losing you. If it was true, if you really were...I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t know. If I never looked into it, I could always keep that hope alive, no matter how small it was.”

“But the first time, you—“

“The first time I was ready to die trying to find you.” He spoke with a straight face, not shying away from making eye contact with her. “I went to Somalia prepared to never leave. And this time,” he nodded his head back. “I had something to live for this time. Someone who needed me. That’s what was different, Ziva.”

She didn’t know what to do with those words. They didn’t match any of the explanations she’d told herself, any of the versions of reality the voices in her head had convinced her of. “I thought you hated me,” she said softly, and she winced at how meek she sounded, how frail. 

“_Hated you?_” He asked, laughing or crying as he said it, which one she couldn’t be sure. “Ziva, how could you possibly think I hated you?”

She shrugged, and she cursed the tears on her face. “When you do something as unforgivable as I have—“

“Nothing you’ve done is unforgivable,” he told her. “I mean, yeah, I didn’t love missing out on the first two years of our daughter's life. But Ziva, nothing could ever make me stop loving you. Nothing.”

Ziva just shook her head. She heard his words, but something inside her couldn’t, wouldn’t, believe them. “I’m not the same woman you once loved, Tony.”

“Bullshit.”

“I don’t think I even know how to do that. How to love,” she said, and she could hear the voice from her nightmares, the one telling her that she’d never truly known, not once in her miserable life, but this time it sounded suspiciously like her own voice. 

“I think the kid sleeping down the hall would care to disagree.”

_Do you even know me, Ima?_ She closed her eyes, tried to ignore the voice, but the image that waited for her was of a daughter she no longer recognized and a family that didn’t need her. A family that didn’t want her. “I should not have come back,” she whispered, “I do not deserve it.”

“If you ever say anything like that again, I’ll—“

“Tony,” She said, and to his credit he stopped talking, but she could see the way his hands formed into fists at his side, as if it pained him to stay silent. “Please, I just— I just—“ 

He pulled her into his chest, put his arms around her, and she let whatever words she might have said disappear into the night. For a moment, she let herself relax. She could feel herself crying, and she had a sneaking suspicion he was crying too. The voice in her head whispered that this pain was her fault, that all their pain was her fault, but she found that it wasn’t as loud when she could hear Tony’s heart beating through his chest, could hear the way he breathed over her shoulder. 

“You are so loved, Ziva. You are so loved.” His words warmed the air around her. She closed her eyes and listened, not to the voice in her head but to the one coming from the man who had his arms wrapped around her. The more he spoke, the more she could hear the difference between him and the version of him that had taunted her subconscious. “I don’t care what you do, who you become. I will never stop loving you, will never stop trying to make you believe that you deserve to be loved, because you do.”

“I don’t know how to make it stop,” she said into his chest. “I don’t know what is real and what isn’t, what is fear and what is reality. Not anymore.”

“Then I’ll help you,” he said. “You just have to ask, Ziva. That’s all. You just have to ask.”

“I’ve already asked so much of you, Tony,” she said, looking up at him. “After all I’ve done, how can I possibly ask this of you, too?”

“Because you love me, and I love you, and we both love Tali. Because we’re a family, and that’s what family does.”

“You and I both know that is not what all families do.”

“Well, it’s what ours does. Starting now. Right now. No more repressing shit, no more isolation. We’re a team, you and I.” He smiled, his grin simultaneously coy and genuine. “We’re partners, Ziva. Always have been, always will be.”

“I suppose we are.” She looked up at him, and she didn’t smile, couldn’t quite shake the grip of whatever kept trying to drag her down, but she almost did. As they walked back to bed, hand in hand under the covers, she repeated that word to herself. Almost. Almost. Almost.

**Author's Note:**

> if you liked it please let me know. also hit me up on tumblr @thanks--for--listening if you want to. it's been a lot of ziva/tiva content the past week or so


End file.
